Human Rights

But the hon. Gentleman knows that those rights existed before the mechanism, and the mechanism is an excellent one for balancing rights against one another. No one would dispute the importance of the rights; the right to life and not to be tortured, the prohibition of slavery, the rights to liberty, to a fair trial and not to be punished without legal authority, respect for private life and family life, the rights to freedom of thought, of expression and of assembly, and the right not to be discriminated against in the exercise of those rights. They give expression to the values of our society. They are common sense; what the person in the street, here and now, would expect our values to be. We all share them. They are rights that we have grown up with. These are human rights. The question is not whether those rights and the values that they represent are the right ones, but what is the best way that they can be given expression and protection under our law, and how can we use them positively to add value in our day-to-day lives? It is an irony that bringing our rights home, in the sense of making them enforceable here rather than in Strasbourg, somehow conspired to make rights to which we are all accustomed seem more alien and foreign, in particular for front-line public authority workers who have to work with them in the mainstream of their day-to-day business. At the very time that we are best able to use our local common sense to apply them, the use of human rights has sometimes produced results that make nonsense instead of common sense. People’s rights have to be practical. They have to work in such a way that they can resolve conflicts—day-to-day conflicts, where the rights of the individual have to be balanced against the rights of the community. In the vast majority of cases, common sense tells us how to resolve those conflicts. Let me give a couple of examples. In January, there was a well publicised row about a decision by Derbyshire police not to release, supposedly on human rights grounds—I am not pointing a finger at what was said or who said it—photographs of convicted criminals who had escaped from prison. Their crimes were serious and included murder. The idea that the human rights of people convicted of such crimes could trump the legitimate use of photographs in trying to recapture the criminals is nonsense. Article 8 specifically recognises that interference with the right to privacy, which it gives, is justified if it is necessary in the interest of national security, public safety and the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, or for other reasons including the protection of others. Alternatively, take the case in which a man evading arrest in Gloucestershire went on to the roof of a house and while there, surrounded by the police, was supplied with—supposedly—Kentucky Fried Chicken. Gloucestershire police were quoted—rightly or wrongly—as saying that they had to look after his human rights, even though he was a bit of a nuisance. There is no Human Rights Act entitlement to Kentucky Fried Chicken—as a vegetarian, I welcome that, although I do not suppose it would ever be compulsory—and there is no right that can sensibly be interpreted to give such an entitlement. It was nonsense.